Your Cold Hot Blood Ran Away From Me to the Sea

How often do I get mad or angry about the "right" things? Why can I watch our basketball team lose to the moonies last night and that makes me angrier than the thought of people in Sudan being brutalized by their government simply because of the tribe that they were born into? Something seems to be terribly wrong in my heart and my focus if those are the things that cause me to burn.

I think one of the reasons that I want to pursue this career in human rights and social justice is that these are ideas that it is okay to be righteously indignant about. This is the stuff that drives even God to anger. Throughout scripture, the only thing that God talks about more than justice is idolatry, which is another huge problem that we conveniently dismiss as Americans who do not bow down to gods of stone or wood, but we have our drugs of choice.

I think that the scripture that Christ first choose to read during his return to the synagogue of his birth was taken from Isaiah 61.

"The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Isaiah 61:1-2

I read that passage and I realize that I could be the hands and feet of God in proclaiming freedom and ending oppression, and that is something that stirs my heart for the future in a way that no amount of money or fame ever could.

Nicholas Kristof's editorial about the potential failure of the Bush Adminstration to bring the perpetrators of the Darfur genocide to justice can be found here.

P.S. Happy 21st Birthday to Sarah Woodroof